Izzy Swart @syntacticsugarglider@merveilles.town

i don't feel like revolutionaries will ever do anything except for reproduce the society and modes of extraction upon which they depend with a change in management and reallocation of the spoils. civilization manufactures a population which depends on it for survival, a population who will reconstitute its logic to suit any crisis.

the manufacture of this subject population happens through deskilling (making yourself useless to yourself and useful to a job market), suppression of other ways of living, putting a price on everything to compel labor force participation. i'm much more interested in how people evade this process of domestication and capture in a thousand small ways than whatever passes for "revolutionary" or "radical".

how to make your own everything. how to stop eating from packages. going off-script. high-context living.

I personally don't think "the internet but it's in 3D" is actually a step forward. imo it's a step back---hypertext feels higher than 3 dimensions

@natecull nobody trusts them. that's not the problem. there is so little actual trust in *anything*, everyone knows that We're The Bad Guys. the problem is the like, insurmountable postmodern superpower of contemporary humanity to continue engaging in the society of spectacle and acting like everything is normal no matter how alienated they are, no matter how much their ability to live free & actualized as humans is infringed. the world is a dead husk and we don't care.

it's aaron swartz remembrance day today and i feel like i should use this to talk about something i think about a lot and that i think should be more widely talked about.

aaron's death was murder. it's as simple as that. the way the us justice system deals with hackers and other "national security threats" (and just the US justice system in general) is explicitly to break people. it's psychological torture intended to either make you bend to their will, off yourself or just become a psychological wreck that is no longer a risk to the system. i don't think it's really possible to understand this until you're subjected to it yourself, and unfortunately i'm subject to a small degree of the same pressure.

the main weapon the US justice system uses to break people is uncertainty, you don't know what's going to happen to you, you don't know when it's going to happen to you and you might just not hear anything for a year. but during that entire time you're aware of the fact that the US may be watching you at all times, they can use all tools at their disposal and anything you say or do can and probably will be used against you in your case. i'm still not entirely sure how good it is for me to talk about this stuff, i'd talk about it a lot more often if i knew (or not at all). they also break you with the conscious misunderstanding of facts, of what you've done, the fact that they do not care about the publics opinion, they make it very clear that they can do with you whatever they want. this all on top of the usual pressure such as like the prospect of the actual sentence itself, the money this kind of case requires, the constant fear of losing even more, not knowing when and if ever you can freely speak and travel again, not knowing when your last free day for the next two decades will be and the painful realization that there is absolutely no guarantee that there isn't just another sealed indictment waiting for you around the corner.

it's hard not to break under this pressure. i fully understand the decision of everyone who broke under this, rest in peace aaron, rest in peace kevin, rest in peace everyone i forgot about. i will try my best not to break, purely out of spite, out of anger in the name of everyone who broke before and because i have the small advantage of not actually being in the US. but let me tell you, if i do break, please don't hold it against me, understand that this is not something any human should ever have to go through, no matter what they may or may not have done.

this is not a call for sympathy, this is a call for anger.

@132ikl

@somnius wee oo wee oo

@syntacticsugarglider @eris@rats-at.work @eris@disqordia.space @chjara hey [tree diagram identifying a particular individual's location in another individual's map of the world], it's [pre-agreed point in a linear sequence of events], time for your ontology flattening

building the future is not a purely technical project, I don't even think it's a primarily technical project. it's a project of community and people, which is to say is inherently political. I think that word is a turn off to many programmers in the West who (due to Cold War era education I guess?) are effectively politically illiterate. and when you insist on being "apolitical" then all you can do is bolster the status quo. this is not how you make progress.

@yaxu that’s a very different reading of Papert, especially Mindstorms.

My understanding of his perspective, at least at that time is more like:

- Computer culture, from programming/engineering, is broken (gatekeeping, very hard to learn, and anchored to specific notions of productivity). It also places the computer in society as a specific type of machine, losing sight of its more generalized potential.

- We need a new concept of computer culture, and not just one, but many computer cultures. It should be based on humanist principles and make it easy for build to conceptualize their own transitional objects—things that make the computer a companion for people’s thinking and creativity rather than strictly a tool.

- LOGO/Turtle was his attempt at something like that, specifically in the context of education since until then computers were very hard to teach, and teachers were not equipped or trained to teach them.

- He specifically says that this is just one example of another way to think about computers, culture, and human-computer relationships. It is not, and should not, be the only one.

I really like this perspective and find that it moves away from programming specific goals, and more towards how to imagine computers differently in society.

"user friendly" is when you don't give the user any meaningful control over a system, hope this helps

DANGER

Happy One Year to @syntacticsugarglider <3